Citizen 865: The Hunt For Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers In America, by Debbie Cenziper

It is impossible for me at least to read this book in 2024 and think in the same way that the author does about this story. This book presents itself to be a narrative non-fiction book, but it clearly carries the brush of some imaginative reconstruction on the part of the author, and her perspective is not one that I can uncritically support. Indeed, the author wants the reader to think of deceptive and slimy prosecutors as being heroes of justice, hounding old men who sought to escape from the horrors of postwar Germany and who happened to have done some things that they weren’t proud of. The author views the hounding of these old people and the removal of citizenship from them as being an act of unmixed justice instead of a highly biased and selective process, one done as a civil trial because it could not meet the evidentiary standards or legal jurisdiction to be done as part of a criminal trial. The author’s unstinting praise for loathsome swamp creatures like FBI director Comey and Clinton’s repulsive Attorney General Janet Reno, as well as her focus on the journalism of the equally loathsome Washington Post and New York Times makes this book a slimy one in terms of its perspective.

At its heart, the author writes this book seeking to contrast people like the titular German-speaking prisoner of war who did what he had to do to avoid being stuck in a prison camp under terrible conditions, and ended up rising to a position of some importance in an SS unit which committed some terrible atrocities in Poland and other places with other people like a Jewish couple who joined with Communist-leaning partisan units in Poland and probably did some things that they regretted and associated with a loathsome Soviet regime equally evil to the Nazi one, but are given a free pass as supposed victims of history. This reader, at least, could not see much difference between the behavior of the Jews or the Ukrainian German, and this undercut the whole dualism of the author in this book, making the FBI’s OSI out to be an antifa thug squad devoted to hounding people as Nazis without dealing with the complicity of American immigrants with other despicable and abominable regimes, like the Soviet Union or Communist China, for example. Instead, the author and her FBI swamp creatures opine that they would have liked better cooperation with their Soviet counterparts, not recognizing the evils of Communism as clearly as they do the evils of Nazism. This sort of moral blindness is, alas, all too typical, and it creates the moral certainty within the total hypocrisy for which America’s left, and America’s current government, is all too deeply wrapped up in.

In terms of its contents, this book has a somewhat sprawling narrative and some major chronological gaps as the author tries to weave her tale in a suitably dramatic fashion, at least as dramatic as paperwork and civil court trials can be. The book begins with an author’s note and a prologue of the delicate dance in the 1992 interview of Jakob Reimer with the FBI, which demonstrates at least part of their slimy and dishonorable tactics in interviewing (and for which he really should have brought a lawyer). After that the author turns her attention to the fate of two young people who met and married and escaped the Holocaust despite losing the rest of their families to its horrors, told in three chapters. The author then turns her attention to the workings of the OSI over the course of fourteen years where investigators and historians struggle to put together the logistics of the destruction of Poland’s Jewish population and find novel ways of prosecuting people for crimes not viewed as crimes at the time and not taking place in the United States or against American citizens, through revoking the citizenship of those who made dishonest and incomplete claims while applying for citizenship–like Hunter Biden’s claim on his gun application, as a matter of fact, not to have been a drug user, as it happens. The third part of the book then returns back to Poland and the United States as both Reimer and the Jewish couple survive World War II and make their way to the United States. The author then closes with what she considers to be a successful understanding of the role of Trawniki in training those who were the tip of the spear of Germany’s successful effort to basically destroy the Jewish population of Poland through massacres and killing camps, before an epilogue that shows how the FBI people involved felt vindicated through the success of their legal efforts to strip old people of their American citizenship to satisfy virtue signaling goals. The book then ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.